Asia Adventure Prep 1

So, as you know, I'm preparing to go into Asia in a little less than a month. Gah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Okay, I'm okay. It's just kind of hitting me for real. Having had no real desire to head in that direction, God surprised me with His special kind of grace in this (as in, this is what I want you to do, are you willing?). Sooo, yeah, I'm headed east...

I've been doing some training, and I've been totally intrigued with all that I'm learning, and I wanted to share some of what I'm learning with you. They will be in generalities, you understand, as I can't be very revealing, but it just blows my mind. The college students there have some of the highest suicide rates - I know at Campus Renewal, we talk about the high rate at Columbia, NYU or UPenn at 4-6 per semester, but this is in the double digits. Incredible, and not in a good way. They study hard and graduate, and are dumped into a job market that international companies say only have 10% of their force is employable. Not because of their intelligence, but because of lack of social skills and character. Can you believe it!!!

So, a huge core of this organization that I'll be working with will address those issues, among others, making these students more likely to get a job when they graduate, and to help them see in a global perspective, rather than only an inward individual one. Amazing!

If you'd like more information about the culture I'll be working with and what I'll be doing send me an email here, and I'll be able to be a little more forthcoming. Also, if you'd like to partner with me in my month over seas (see thermometer to the right) click here. It will be life changing to all involved!

Friend to the Outcasts

Here's a story of Campus Renewal in Knoxville, Tennessee. It still touches my heart, though it can get get buried in the daily tasks. Meet the Pikes...

Pike's at UT...A Fraternity Finding Jesus at the CHOP

   For 100+ shattered and uprooted Pi Kappa Alpha (Pikes) fraternity brothers, the last place they could have imagined a fraternity meeting was at the UT CHOP. Last year it became an unlikely “beacon of hope” for the outcast fraternity.

   As quickly as news stories around the world told of sordid deeds worthy of official expulsion from the UT campus, CHOP opened its doors for these displaced frat brothers to meet and pray every night. One of them described it as, “The first and the last place we rejects would have to ask to be allowed to meet & pray. They embraced us with loving arms and two full plates of chocolate chip cookies.”
As word spread that the fraternity had found our "four walls with couches," more and more Pike’s showed up each week for prayer and Bible study. Soon the room overflowed with 30-40 young men. “Guys who had been given up on and kicked to the curb were shown a new kind of love at the CHOP - Jesus' love,” notes Pikes chaplain Colin Skinner. “We found common ground to meet, pray, fellowship and be Pikes again, but now immersed in the Lord as we gathered in His name and learned about his son Jesus Christ. Some of these same guys before ‘the incident’ didn’t even know his name. The CHOP is our home and our Bible study with the Pike’s continues to grow.”

Again, this is why I do what I do.

One Cry Citywide Gathering

One Cry Citywide Gathering was really, really impressive. I did a small snapshot on my monthly newsletter, but one of my staff members wrote up a wonderfully summary of this amazing evening!




 Thanks so much to all of you who prayed, and also to those of you who attended Friday night's One Cry citywide university prayer meeting at Calvary Baptist.  It was a wonderful night of worship and prayer, with over four hundred students from all over the NYC area.  We not only had students from a wide variety of colleges, but also from vocational and art schools, graduate students, recent alumni, an NYC chaplain, the head of a divinity school, and many others.  It was a nice mix of young people together with a range of older adults in ministry.

    David Epstein, the pastor of Calvary Baptist, opened the night in prayer.  The sanctuary was full right from the beginning, and once the students settled in to the sessions of worship and prayer, the presence of the Lord in the house was powerful.  Akpene Torku and two students emceed the evening, keeping the time moving well.  Camille San Pablo and the One Cry worship band did a great job of leading all of us in lifting our voices and hands to honor God.  Jeremy Story cast the vision for repentance, unity, and revival on the campuses and in the city.  Ruth Zhou of Youth Evangelism Fellowship, Eric Bennett of The King's College, and others did a great job of opening the prayer sessions on humbling ourselves, seeking God until we find Him, and then turning from our own wicked ways so that God can heal us as well as our campuses and our city.  Many lives were touched during those prayer sessions as students testified afterwards.

    Before the final prayer session, I spoke briefly from Isaiah 55, "Ho! Everyone who thirsts, Come to the waters; And you who have no money, Come, buy and eat.  Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price..."  The Gospel is not about working hard to make ourselves good enough for heaven.  So many of these young people have worked very hard to gain acceptance to their universities, but the Gospel is not about work.  It is rather about receiving the free gift of grace and forgiveness in Jesus Christ.  About twenty seven students responded to the invitation to receive that free gift of forgiveness, and prayed together with me.

    I spoke again briefly near the end of the night on catching and holding onto the vision of just how important Christian unity is.  Jesus is coming back for one church, one people, not a collection of groups or denominations.  We are members of one another and we need one another so that the Lord's full purposes will be accomplished on the campuses and in the city.  Once again, it was difficult to get students to leave the sanctuary as they wanted to continue praying, singing, worshipping God, and talking long after the time ended.  To me one of the greatest blessings was standing on the street outside of Calvary Baptist afterwards and still seeing students singing the praises of God as they exited the building and walked away down 57th Street, something you don't see very often in New York!

    Many people came up afterwards to say how blessed they had been by the time.  One young lady who did not want to be there and did not want to pray told another person afterwards that now she did want to become a Christian, that she had never experienced a time like this before.  Other students testified to receiving healing, being filled with the Spirit, or receiving new freedom during the evening.  God moved in response to the prayers of many, so please keep praying with us for these students as they return to their campuses refreshed and with new vision.  God bless you all!

Reaching Campus - Fools Marching in the Dark

I really love this post from our national blog, Reaching Campus. It's by one of my staff workers here in NYC, and he tells of our walk so succinctly. He does me proud, I must say. Read for yourself, and let me know what you think...

Fools Marching in the Dark

Learning to Walk in Faith and Not By Sight

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase” (Martin Luther King Jr.). 

Living in the world’s most influential and powerful city, you are often reminded that people walk the streets of New York at a blistering speed of 20 mph. It is a city where diplomats from around the world sit at the United Nations trying to solve the world’s problems; however, they inevitably fail or have little power to stop the tanks, social uprising protests, and inequality that surround the world.

It is the center for fashion where the motto of the town is “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” It is a place where people dream of being the stars on Broadway or dream being the wolf on Wall Street instead of a faithful lamb. Living as believers in New York City, it feels like fools marching in the dark…learning to walk in faith and not by sight on our campus.

Falling Forward

What do I mean by falling forward? I thought about one of the greatest commencement speeches back in 2011 at UPenn. Denzel Washington spoke on failure – not a typical speech for a graduating class. He brought up a new concept of falling; he called it “falling forward.” Often times, we are told that we need to fall back on something when we fail in life, our career, and school. Denzel Washington jokingly said falling forward allows you to see what you are hitting when you fall. It’s a pretty scary experience. Yet failure is part of our walk. We learn that in everything we do for the Lord, there will be failure and that how we move forward from it requires faith and trust.

For the past couple of months, I have been reading and pondering on where God has taken me and my walk in faith. I remember recounting all the failures and attempts when I was a student and looking back at each step led me closer to God. Despite falling, it kept me going and encouraged me to trust in God. I found that as a student, things don’t pan out, our prayer meetings are few, and the world tells us to turn back, causing everything on our campuses to seem dead. But there is a quiet resolve knowing that God is still working and that His work bears fruit for His kingdom.

What we do even in our failures has purpose to help us grow more, depending daily on Him and looking upward even though the world would call us fools. N.T. Wright said, “What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether.”

Marching Through the Dark with God Alongside Us, Anything is Possible

“If we hold on, and though we carry scars, God is with us marching through the dark. Turn the light on, and hope will bring us far, yes the fools are marching through the dark. So turn the light on, cuz home is not too far, God is with us marching through the dark” (Fools Marching in the Dark -Tim Be Told).

Living in New York, I face many obstacles and the forces of the enemy that try to keep people in the dark. People are not seeing the hope and the light that Jesus brings. Yet despite seeing so many campuses in the dark, I have so much hope and passion to see one day, consistent prayer covering this city. As a student, I was often discouraged by the darkness and overwhelming odds and the word of the world telling me that what you’re doing is foolish. Yet as I was listening to the song by a band named Tim Be Told, it reminded me that everything we do for the Kingdom, though it seems foolish, it brings about a breakthrough.

As Phillip Yancey said, “Perhaps something like this was what Jesus had in mind when he turned again and again to his favorite topic, the kingdom of God. In the soil of this violent disordered world, an alternative community may take root. It lives in hope of a day of liberation, in the meantime it aligns itself with another world, not just spreading rumors but planting settlements in advance of the coming reign.”

As we continue living and holding tight to the message of the work done on the Cross, we shouldn’t feel discouraged but walk in faith and not by sight because often times we may not see the entire picture. God will one day, as it is written in Revelation 21, make all things new. Keep planting on your campus and march forward.

Anthony Deng is a New York City Metro Campus Coordinator for Campus Renewal. He leads and coordinates volunteers for events such as One Cry and helps facilitate the New York City Metro Area student core team. Anthony was born and raised in New York City graduated from CUNY the City College of New York, and has a B.A in History and Asian Studies. Anthony gives New York City tours to freshmen of various campuses. On his tour, he teaches and shows students various hidden gems of New York City. On the side, he loves to collect college sweatshirts and t-shirts.  In addition, he loves to play and watch basketball and football. He an avid fan of the Pacers & Colts.

Motivation is Simply in the Why

Another Post form our national blog, Reaching Campus, that totally blessed me!

Motivation is Simply in the Why.

When Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was arrested by the Nazis in World War II and put in Auschwitz, the infamous death camp, he was stripped of everything: property, family, possessions, and a manuscript he had spent years researching and writing on finding meaning in life. The manuscript had been sewn into the lining of his coat.

“Now it seemed as if nothing and no one would survive me; neither a physical nor a spiritual child of my own,” Frankl wrote. “I found myself confronted with the question of whether under such circumstances my life was ultimately void of any meaning.”

A few days later, the Nazis forced the prisoners to give up what little clothing they still wore. “I had to surrender my clothes and in turn inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had been sent to the gas chamber,” said Frankl. “Instead of the many pages of my manuscript, I found in the pocket of the newly acquired coat a single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, which contained the Jewish prayer ‘Shema Yisrael’ (Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one God. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.)

“How should I have interpreted such a ‘coincidence’ other than as a challenge to ‘live’ my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?”

Frankl later reflected on his ordeal in Man’s Search for Meaning, saying, “There is nothing in the world that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is meaning in one’s life…. He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how.’ 

How to Motivate

How do you motivate students to mission?  I found myself in my third year as a campus missionary trying to figure this out.  I went through my catalogue of seminary answers and compared that to real life always coming up short.  I found that what was natural to me was quite challenging for some students.  Where I was able to share my life with those in need of Jesus, students were finding it difficult to get motivated.  The answer to motivation is in the why.

Elijah’s Motivation

Elijah first enters the Old Testament in 2 Kings 17.  Elijah was given the task of demonstrating to all of Israel that Yahweh was Lord over all, not Baal.  God asked him to go to Zarapheth immediately (v.9).  The Bible says in the following verse that Elijah went immediately.  He didn’t have to think about it, pray about it, or weigh the pros and cons.  Elijah demonstrated through obedience the reason for the “why”.

Why did Elijah respond instantly?  Why does he speak so confidently about God?  The reason for the “why” is simply that he knew without a doubt that Yahweh was Lord over all.  He knew all that God had done.  He knew His Scripture (or he would not have been able to predict a drought; see Deutoronomy).

The challenge with students and mission is the why.  Why do we respond to a skeptic’s questions?  Why do we sacrifice ourselves daily for the will of God?  Why do we invite others to live on mission with us? Why? Why? Why?  The answers to those simple questions are what motivate me to missional living.